ART AND WOMAN.

BY THE REV. M. CALLAWAY, D.D.,

Professor of English Literature in Emory College, Oxford, Ga.

To put man in marble and in bronze, the Greeks first build him up in bone and muscle. Perfect statuary comes of a perfect body; and to this end the orchestra and gymnasium are established, the two institutions which are at once the source and stimulus of sculpture. In Lacedemonia, where the air is highly charged with oxygen, and the inhabitants are versatile and ingenious, the young people display their skill in dancing with an endless variety of manner and movement. In the seventh century before Christ there were vast establishments for the furtherance of graceful and rhythmic instruction. Besides the "House of the Muses," at which Sappho presided, there were several others at Lesbos conducted by women, and pupils attended from the neighboring islands, studying music, recitation, and the art of posturing; and it is said that, priding in their accomplishments-unlike the ladies of our colleges "they ridiculed the ignorant peasant girls, who did not know how to raise their dress above the ankle." What with us is an incident was at Sparta and Athens the main design of education, viz., skill in calisthenics.

We are too far removed in time, and differ too much in taste, to comprehend fully the poesy, and pantomime, and processional tread, that made up the orchestra; but we divine enough to conjecture what such a culture contributes to the arts which portray the "human form divine."

Along-side the orchestra is the gymnasium. The exigences of their civilization made the Spartans martinets in matters. military. Nine thousand free families in the midst of two hundred thousand slaves is a disproportion and a disadvantage sufficient to arouse the masters to their danger and their defense. The Spartan becomes a soldier or nothing. Discipline

begins at the cradle; and the deformed and the feeble child is condemned to death by the council of elders, while the vigorous child is enrolled for the army. As exceptional in Greek provinces, girls in Sparta have their gymnasia, and figure freely in some of the palestrian exercises with the men. "The effect of this discipline," says Xenophon, "is that the Spartans are the healthiest of all the Greeks, and among them are found the finest men and handsomest women in Greece." In the Dialogues of Plato, Charmides is complimented on the manly beauty of both his grandsires and its heritage in his own person. Competitions in beauty are common among all ranks and both sexes. The most courtly men at Elis were selected to carry the offerings to the goddess. Pausanias found competitions of beauty in Arcadia, in which women were rivals, that had lasted for nine centuries. The devotion of these nine centuries to the orchestra and gymnasium is the solution of the supremacy of Praxitiles and Phidias. Every Spartan father and mother conducts art to its climax in sculpture, and in some sort provides the models and indicates the strain of these marble-poets. Besides these national schools, the clear sky, the genial climate, the bracing sea-breeze, the frugal diet, even the economic soil of Greece, help to place her engrossing love of nature and life in the eternal monuments of her art. Since Phidias, every ardent disciple makes a pilgrimage to Athens, or seeks the shrines of his copyists in the temples of their adoption. The protracted experiment of Greece is complete; her success is full, and the award to her merit is living and universal. So far as art then aspired no higher niche was attainable. Masterpieces were called for, and they were forthcoming. The man had filled the Maker's measure, and the artist had measured the man in the majesty of marble.

In the splendid palace assigned us by the Father, we could not be indifferent to our personal fitness for its occupancy. Not that to cherish the body, or to secure for it strength and beauty, or to seek for health, are the imperious duties or the most worthy pursuits; and yet they are such as are not to be disregarded, or to remain unassumed. A first duty of man is to live and to keep living. To be is well; to be strongly is bet

ter. It is of prime concern thereto, then, not merely to cultivate a graceful but a supple and sinewy body. In his "muscular collectedness" the Greek had not only his personal delight, but his personal defense. So manifest, indeed, are some of the immediate and the remote benefits of the palestra and discus, that educators are restoring the ancient practices, or devising substitutes, in order, among other things, to check the exclusive intellectual trend of our public institutions. In our families and schools there is a revival of physical training, a purpose to reinstate the Dorian step and style, with adjustments to society as it is among us. Practical physiology antedates theoretical philosophy; the wrestlers in the amphitheater, the disputants of the Agora. Brawn and brain are not necessarily bred at once and alike, yet there is a sympathy between them, and health in the one augurs health in the other. We are wiser and worthier workers for the hardness and accompanying healthfulness left us by our ancestors. From the early and from the late national exemplars of bodily exercise, there come to us voices of warning; and as art speaks of her and through her, the monitory messages are directed chiefly to woman. From the nature of things, she is present in every essay to enshrine in marble and canvas the ideals most grateful to human sensibility; for, in the elder days of earth, God thought of beauty, and woman breathed. Nor does it change the fact of the divineness of her charms, whether woman appears on earth a vision of glory, as Milton's Eve, or is evolved by the sublimating processes of an unreckoned past; for she, at any period, is to her brothers contemporary of "daughters since born the fairest." In the spontaneous homage paid her, and in its private and public proffering, lies her peril. Whatever be the soul of the sentiment appealed to by the artist in the delineation of womanly beauty, the sensuous or the sacred, whether the typical woman be an Aphrodite or an Athene, the admiration is accorded.

Entering the harbor at Athens, the object that first greets the eye when nearing the ancient seat of learning and sculpture, proudly poised on the commanding height, is the helmeted Athene, symbolizing, in the tradition of her birth and

in the majesty of her mien, the sovereignty of mind, and its significance as illustrated in the refinement and exaltation of woman. The Venus de Medici, long entombed at the villa of Hadrian, near Tivoli, exhumed, and now on exhibition in the Petti Gallery, at Florence, is the pattern of womanly proportion for all time, and, so far as sculpture is capable, the ideal of womanly beauty. In this Venus there lurks no hint of harm, there burns no fire of passion, there escapes no feeling of the forbidden. The artist presents the goddess freed of the gross and sensual, without passion, but peerless. These splendid productions are the crowning consequences of courses of national training, commemorative of Greek civilization, the embodied thought, indeed, of all converging civilizations concerning the personal impressiveness of woman crystallized forever. If, however, with a supposed and warrantable knowledge of her charms, woman should yield to Narcissine worship of herself, and this concession be confirmed through the cultus of such masterpieces, then the Greeks have carved for naught, and schools of art are agencies of evil. But the consciousness of beauty is no more to be denied or suppressed than that of any other power. A quality, or faculty, or genius, above that of our fellows, is, if it exist at all, the argument for its recognition and enjoyment, rather than for its denial and sequestration. Last summer some gentlemen were driving down the most frequented street of Genoa, and, amid the throng on the sidewalk, two Italian girls more beautiful than those about them were noticed. Dressed in the airy costume of their suuny clime, as fresh and sweet they seemed as our Georgia morning-glories; and though strangers and foreigners, the gentlemen made involuntary obeisance to their charms, and the sensible girls smilingly acknowledged the tribute, and the citizens applauded the self-moving courtesy. A knowledge of personal power may, by undue indulgence, make one a tyrant, or pedant, or other monster; and the chance of abuse and of arrogance is not less in the case of beauty than in that of other gifts. Remember Helen and Cleopatra. According to the use of her power is woman's weakness or strength. A wise man is useful not in despite of, but in the ratio of, his

riches. A captain is great not according to the size, but the service, of his army. Should self-complacency ensue from the endowment of beauty, it would seem to be misplaced; for however precious the gift may be, it is not paramount. In its outward phase it is but an index to the inner self, the harmony of the mental and moral nature typified by the happy ordination of the physical graces.

Sculpture matured earlier than painting, for it is easier of execution, is the exponent of simpler wants and a cruder civilization, and is less susceptible of the glow of passion and the pause of thought. Rarely does statuary express energy and action, as read in the modern face. The head is without significance, it has few specialties, and is generally in repose. The torso is more important; the trunk, the turn of the heel to the Greek, meaning as much as the shape of the head. "When a figure displays energetic action, like the Fighting Gladiator in the Louvre, or the Discobulus at Rome, the effect, entirely physical, exhausts every idea and every desire within its capacity, so long as the discus is well launched, or the blow is well bestowed or parried. Generally speaking, the attitude is tranquil-the figure does nothing, says nothing, is at rest, relaxed without weariness; now standing on one foot, now half turning; a moment ago running like the Lacedemonian girl, its action always one of indifference; the idea which animates it so indefinite, and for us so far removed, that we still, after a dozen hypotheses, cannot tell what the Venus of Milo is doing."

It requires, too, the mastery of fewer of the principles of mechanics than painting. Out of the solid substance it is easier to conceive a figure chiseled in relief than to people the plane canvas. Several hundred years were spent in teaching the child of the brush to stand alone and untotteringly. The Venus de Medici is the archetype of the feminine physique, and not a lifeless one. Its faultlessness of proportion, its delicacy of turn, its easy articulations, its scrupulous niceness of finish in limb and lineament, constitute its queenliness; and yet the vivifying power of the imagination is wanted to call to the surface the blue veins, the quickening of the inner ear that